English to Babel Translator

So I’ve been working on the Babel project recently. I took the stanford AI classes last fall and have been inspired to work on this stuff again.

I’ve been using Babel to create a non-search base AI for interactive fiction games like Colossal Cave and Zork. The IF community is surprisingly robust. There are thousands of games and a variety of engines and tools. I was able to easily hook up and run the FyreVM IF virtual machine.

So in order to have my AI sense the world I needed to develop an English to Babel translator. So I did. It’s now available on the online translator.

The new translator is built upon SharpNLP. SharpNLP is not a great parser. It is a port of the Java’s OpenNLP and hasn’t been updated since 2006. The parse accuracy is probably around 50% while other parsers get around 90%.

The translator itself still needs a lot of work but it’s good enough that I am able to start on the programming of the AI.

I’m using colossal cave to test and fairly early I’m the adventure a grate needs to be unlocked. But the SharpNLP parser isn’t parsing the description correctly so the AI isn’t able to see the grate. I’ll be needing to switch out the parser soon and will probably use the IKVM project to run a Java parser.